Louie Anderson Is Dead at 68

He kept audiences laughing over four decades. But comedian Louie Anderson has taken his last bow. The longtime Family Feud host and actor who took home a 2016 Emmy for his role in the FX series Baskets died Friday morning at age 68, his longtime publicist Glenn Schwartz confirms to Deadline. He was at a Las Vegas hospital undergoing treatment for diffuse large B-cell lymphoma, the most common type of non-Hodgkin's lymphoma, Schwartz told TMZ earlier this week. Comedian Pauly Shore tweeted Thursday that he'd visited Anderson to say goodbye. "He's still with us, but keep him in your prayers," he wrote.

Anderson was "a constant presence on stage and screen since the mid-1980s," per Deadline. His career was launched when he won the 1981 Midwest Comedy Competition, and he debuted on Johnny Carson's The Tonight Show in 1984, according to the outlet. He went on to win two Daytime Emmy Awards while voicing a version of himself in the cartoon series Life with Louie, based on his life with 10 siblings, which aired from 1994 to 1998, per the AP. The show also made him the only three­-time recipient of the Humanitas Prizes for writing, per Deadline. From 1999 to 2002, he hosted the popular game show Family Feud.

He also had acting roles in movies, including Ferris Bueller's Day Off, Sandy Wexler, Coming To America, and its 2021 sequel, and in TV shows, including Grace Under Fire, Chicago Hope, Touched by an Angel, Ally McBeal, and Nash Bridges. He recently starred in Baskets as the mother of identical twin brothers played by Zach Galifianakis, for which he earned three consecutive Emmy nominations for outstanding supporting actor in a comedy series. He took home the award in 2016, the first year he was nominated. The native of Saint Paul, Minn., who'd recently joined the cast of BET series Twenties, also performed in stand-up comedy specials and wrote several best-selling books. (More obituary stories.)